The Building Coder

Family Symbols versus Types and SelectionFilterElement

Here is a question that has been asked a couple of times recently and thus seems worthwhile clarifying: Question: If I access the OwnerFamily.Symbols in a family document, i.e. an RFA file, it returns an empty collection. If I load that same family into a project and access the Family.Symbols property, it returns the correct expected family types. Why does this property not work in the family editor? Put differently, the following code snippet will show zero in the message... Read more →

AU Classes on Python, UI, Server and Framework APIs

Thursday was another very full and fruitful day at AU. I gave my third and last class, the most exciting one in my eyes, on some UI and integration aspects. I was unable to attend Iffat May's class introducing Python and using it in Revit and Vasari via RevitPythonShell, but I love her material so much I am including it anyway. Adam Nagy presented a class addressing cloud and mobile development and the Revit Server API. Finally, Arnošt Löbel provided... Read more →

Meetings, Football, and RevitRubyShell

The whole EMEA DevTech team is meeting in Neuchâtel prior to the coming weekend's annual Autodesk football tournament taking place here. I won't be able to play myself, unfortunately, for the first time in many years, since I had a prior appointment with friends to go climb the Spitzhorn mountain. We also held a virtual meeting with Stephen Preston from the US, who is now our world-wide DevTech manager. Here we are in virtual union, from left to right, Gary... Read more →

On Creating a Mass from 3D Points

This post unfortunately does not provide a complete solution to an interesting task, just a couple of ideas. In his comment on the Revit 2013 API Ammar asks: Question: Is there a way to generate a mass from a list of X, Y, Z points? Answer: Unfortunately I do not see any way to achieve this through the Revit API directly. I can imagine using some external tool such as ACIS or AutoCAD, feed it the points, generate a SAT... Read more →